Exiled by the Institution

In October Paul Miller published an article called “UMC 2025: The Death Tsunami Was a Picnic”. I had never met Paul, and I was a little mad that I didn’t know who he was, because the piece is very high quality. So I asked him on. He also built a set of infographics for our conversation, which you can see in the video. What follows is my write-up of that conversation.In 2011 Lovett Weems of the Lewis Center for Church Leadership gave the United Methodist Church a name for what was coming: the “death tsunami.” The boomers who lead and fill these churches are roughly the same age. They are going to die in roughly the same period, and the mainline is not at replacement rate. Weems said that while he was still inside the UMC, before disaffiliation season ever started.Then disaffiliation came, and it made things worse. Surprise, surprise. Now that the 2025 data sets are out on umdata.org, Paul went through all of them. His conclusion, and mine, is that the UMC is not in a death spiral. It is in a free fall. That will surprise no one who left.I had two reasons for wanting to talk with him. The Global Methodist Church is not reporting numbers like this right now, and I wanted to ask what kind of numbers are actually worth reporting. I also think there is a natural interest in data for anyone who believes faith bears fruit that can be observed. Jesus said it could.“Make a tree good and its fruit will be good, or make a tree bad and its fruit will be bad, for a tree is known by its fruit.” — Matthew 12:33 (BSB)You can’t be a slave to the numbers. But the numbers should interest you.Puppies and SunshineWhen I asked Paul how he was, he said “puppies and sunshine,” which is the answer he gives everybody. We figured out before we hit record that we’re almost exactly the same age. He has listened to my channel for years, and he went through the same move into the GMC that I did.Paul is full-time clergy, and he also teaches humanities at Veritas Academy, a classical Christian school in Leola, Pennsylvania. He has been there six years, mostly teaching literature and history, with some theology. His children attend too. His explanation for all that work: if he doesn’t stay busy, he gets into trouble. During COVID he taught himself to install a doorknob.He did not grow up in church. In his own words, he followed a pretty girl into a Bible study at Calvary Chapel of Philadelphia, and later found out she was the pastor’s daughter. The next Sunday he was in her father’s church, Bethesda United Methodist in Philadelphia, parking under I-95 when it rained. They have been married since 2007 and have four children.Before that, he couldn’t tell you the difference between the Charlie Brown Christmas special and Roman Catholicism. His parents were not even Christmas-and-Easter people. About five or six weeks in, after church, he felt it: a warming in the chest, and the sense that he couldn’t turn away from this now.He came to ministry by way of banking and finance, which explains his affinity for numbers. The crash of 2007 to 2009 knocked him around, and his wife told him he was studying Scripture all the time anyway, so why not get a degree in it. He went to Lancaster Bible College and was first appointed in 2014. He was United Methodist clergy for twelve years.Hopeland and the Eastern Pennsylvania LawsuitPaul’s church, Hopeland, was one of the churches in the Eastern Pennsylvania lawsuit (I published my conversation with Joe DiPaolo about that fight the morning Paul and I spoke). The suit started with 41 churches in 2022 and grew to 50. The docket says 51 because one church goes by two names. Paul was in court every single day of the trial.What broke the camel’s back for Hopeland was the conference’s silence. In 2022, after General Conference was delayed a third time, the Eastern Pennsylvania Conference said it would publish its disaffiliation process before the end of May. May passed. June passed. July passed. Paul had been telling his people the information was coming. When the church finally voted, the vote was 103 to 6 to leave. Some of the more progressive members voted to go too. They weren’t crazy about the direction, but they liked the conference even less.For Hopeland, Paul said, it was never really about the presenting issue. It was about trust. The church had been through a run of pastors, and every new appointment was a battle. That distrust predated him by years.At the end of July, Hopeland sent the conference a letter terminating the relationship. The conference said they weren’t allowed to do that, and Hopeland said, “Thank you for your opinion.” Just before we spoke, Bishop Cynthia Moore-Koikoi sent a letter naming Hopeland and two other churches and moving toward exigent circumstances to reclaim the property. Paul couldn’t say much more than that, and I asked people to pray for him and his church.I said what I have seen around the country: these conferences don’t seem much concerned with arguing the merits. They hire a big firm and spend whatever it takes to exhaust the other side, and it has worked nearly everywhere except Texas and perhaps Alabama. The bishops have declared the season of church exits over. Paul called that wish-casting. It reminded me of George W. Bush on the aircraft carrier.Cotton Candy and Swiss CheeseMy first question was whether everything UMData collects is worth collecting. Paul’s answer was that all information tells you something, even inaccurate information, because it tells you about the methods and sometimes the motive behind them.He gave the UMC real credit here. They didn’t have to release these numbers, because the numbers don’t look good, and they released them anyway. That deserves credit for transparency. The United States data is decent, with some flaws. The international data, he said, has the consistency of cotton candy or Swiss cheese.2025 is the first year the overseas numbers have really been posted, and Paul can see why the church was hesitant: in many places the numbers simply don’t exist. Some conferences on other continents didn’t report anything for a decade, not even a journal. Only 3 of the 32 African conferences he could find reported every single year. That’s not even 10%.That’s a troubling thing, because the GMC is setting its reporting norms right now. I put forward petitions to General Conference requiring a certain level of reporting from every annual conference, and they were shut down quickly as America-centric. My knee-jerk reaction was to call that racist, as if being Anglo is what makes reporting possible. The best argument I heard against my petitions was that many of these churches are in persecuted areas, and reporting could make them easier targets.Paul’s suggestion was to let people give an estimate along with a confidence level when exact numbers aren’t possible. He also thinks the UMC gathered far too much data, leaned on its statistics to lead, and didn’t know what to do with them. The GMC could ask a fraction of the questions, get more out of them, and get more buy-in, because it would take a pastor maybe ten minutes.891 a DayThen we went through Paul’s infographics. The first covers members and congregations. From the end of 2015 to the end of 2025, professing members fell 46% and congregations fell from 31,631 to 20,148. Something a lot of people don’t know: the United Methodist Church has been in decline since its very first year. There was never a point at which it grew. For a long time the decline was meager. Now it is accelerating.Paul pointed to 2016, the General Conference that produced the Commission on a Way Forward. Before that, the yearly losses ran around 0.8% to 1.6%. In 2017 the loss hit 2% for the first time in his records, and it has stayed at 2% or worse every year since. Ultimately, the church went from about 7 million members in 2015 to 3.8 million.The next slide breaks it down by day: an average of 891 professing members lost every day for ten years. Paul’s point in p… Get full access to PlainSpoken at plainspokenpod.substack.com/subscribe

.] Joe DiPaolo has been on PlainSpoken more than almost anyone. He, Odell and Lonnie were my core crew for Considering Charlotte. This week he came back to tell what has happened since: an early retirement, a lost lawsuit, a new church, and a new appointment as a Global Methodist presiding elder. What follows is a written recap of our conversation.Four Years EarlyThe last many of you heard from Joe, he was still inside the United Methodist Church, helping everybody see clearly what was happening there. A lot has happened since, and he told it plainly.After the 2024 General Conference in Charlotte, Joe knew he couldn’t stay. That December, when the time came to make his request for the coming appointment year, he requested early retirement. He retired in June 2025, four years early. A week later another Lancaster church called. It was one of the roughly 50 Eastern Pennsylvania churches in a lawsuit against the conference, and its pastor had gone on leave unexpectedly. Joe served on its interim pastoral team for a year.The trial finally came in late March and early April 2026, during Holy Week, “which I think was God’s sense of humor.” The judge found for the conference. On June 1 Joe submitted his withdrawal from the UMC. On June 2 he was received as an elder in the Global Methodist Church. On July 12 he started services for a new church plant. On September 1 he was appointed a presiding elder. “So it’s been quite a ride the last year.”Nine Out of TenI’ve interviewed United Methodist clergy a few years from retirement who were in denial: it won’t be that bad. They were wrong. Joe didn’t hold on. I asked him why it was worth the cost.He couldn’t be in leadership in the UMC after Charlotte, he said, and he was at a flagship congregation. Some of the bishops he had been fighting were consecrated in his own sanctuary when it hosted the jurisdictional conference. He named three reasons.First, the church had untethered itself from its doctrine. “On paper, we had the Articles of Religion and the Confession of Faith. But the real controlling doctrine was religious pluralism.” With so many who wanted accountability gone to the GMC, “there was not going to be any more accountability to what we said we believed.”Second, “the UMC had effectively attempted to repeal the Seventh Commandment.”You shall not commit adultery. — Exodus 20:14 (BSB)Beyond the endorsement of same-sex marriage, he said, Charlotte eliminated monogamy from the Social Principles for the global church and removed adultery as grounds for disciplinary action against clergy. An effort on the last day to restore it for all married clergy was voted down. “To me, that was the church saying, Lord, we’ll take nine out of 10. I just don’t think any church can do that.”Third, governance had broken down irretrievably. The General Conference was supposed to govern, but after 2019 the bishops refused to implement the Traditional Plan and “imposed their progressivist vision on the church.” Now, he said, “the bishops are running the show.”The mess continues. Joe told me Bishop John Schol, his former bishop, is suing his successor and protégée, Bishop Cynthia Moore-Koikoi, for defamation in New Jersey civil court, over public comments she and her leaders made while trying to fix the New Jersey conference’s finances.Every reason Joe gave was theological. A very worldly decision about his financial well-being was made on faith. “It’s a matter of conviction,” he said. He didn’t know what would happen financially, but God has been gracious and things have worked out surprisingly well. Even if they hadn’t? “I told my wife, if need be, I’ll go work for Home Depot.”Only Five Got OutThe suit began in early 2023 with 51 or 52 churches asking the court to remedy what they believed was a violation of their right under the Book of Discipline to disaffiliate under reasonable conditions.I asked Joe to remind me how disaffiliation worked in Eastern Pennsylvania. The bishop’s office released a “preliminary term sheet” listing all kinds of costs, plus open-ended items to be filled in only after a church voted to leave. Churches were told repeatedly that the prices were a floor, not a ceiling. After the deadline, the five that stuck with it negotiated the price down, but still paid hefty fees. “Only five got out in Eastern Pennsylvania. One hundred and fifty got out in Central Pennsylvania. Three hundred got out in Western Pennsylvania… So it gives you an idea how tough the system was.”The churches were represented by the National Center for Life and Liberty and a local attorney. Joe thought they did a fabulous job. On the last day of trial, “everybody was smiles.”Testify, Then Get Offered a ChurchThe conference’s former treasurer and CFO testified that he had begged the bishop not to release those numbers because they were inherently misleading and would discourage churches from leaving. “You’d think that would be enough by itself.”Then there was Joe’s own day on the stand. The conference hadn’t expected him and objected to his testimony, but the judge allowed it. The bishop and the district superintendents were all in the room. After court adjourned, one of the superintendents came up and offered Joe a church. “I was like, but didn’t you just in there hearing me testify against you?” Joe thinks it shows how desperate the conference is: very short of clergy, with a lot of churches it can’t fill.What stunned me most was how the conference rested its case. After the churches spent three or four days making theirs, the conference haggled for an hour or two over documents and then rested without putting forward a single witness. “It turned out they must have known something because it did go in their favor.”Bishop Schol attended a day or two and then stopped coming. Joe testified that at Schol’s very first meeting with his elders, which was recorded, the bishop promised to help churches leave if they wanted to. In his deposition, Joe said, Schol denied any recollection of it. The conference argued it was an internal church matter and that the churches could have gotten out if they had stayed in the process.The judge’s written decision, as Joe read it, said the churches had shown the conference acted poorly, even incompetently, but had not proven intent to defraud them of their right. I don’t know how anyone proves intent without a device that looks into a man’s heart. All you can show is a certain degree of bad acting.Four Ways ForwardAfter the verdict, the churches went four ways. About 40 are still in the appeal, which Joe expects to reach the appellate court in February or March. Several folded and stayed United Methodist. Two turned over the keys and walked away from their buildings. And five are pursuing what Joe called “bolt and run”: declaring legal independence from the conference, changing their documents, deeds and names, and now being sued by the conference for the property.“God’s Got This”Small groups left the church where Joe had been serving and another church that chose not to appeal. On the last day of April, two people sat down with him. “We’re tired of… we don’t want to fight anymore in court. We want to start fresh. We want to start a GMC church. Will you help us?”They called a meeting for May 5 and had to change the venue: 88 people showed up from several churches. Joe took stock with them. No legal entity to sign a lease, pay a bill or receive a donation. No site, no pastor, no staff, no money. “But aside from that, God’s got this. And boy, we found out that he did.”They held their first service on July 12 under the open-air tabernacle of the Landisville Camp Meeting, then moved in September to a rental space at the Farm and Home Center. They average 70 to 80 people on Sundays. Last week, Cornerstone became the first newly chartered GMC church plant in the Northeast Conference. Bishop Mark Webb and his wife are members, and she serves on the leadership team. Aldersgate GMC in York, pastored by Bob Kaylor, a… Get full access to PlainSpoken at plainspokenpod.substack.com/subscribe

Considering Johannesburg, Episode 5. Watch the full episode above. The free discussion guide is here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1svQ8jWm7acuCs85jaNOZUH1nnW07v98B/view?usp=drive_link. On the last morning of the General Conference in Johannesburg, Bishop Jeff Greenway told the delegates how the church most of us came out of got its doctrine. In 1968 the Methodists and the Evangelical United Brethren came together, and each brought its own statement of faith. They were supposed to be made one. They never did. Instead, he said, “they put them in the front of the Book of Discipline, said they were historical markers, and that put the crack in the doctrinal foundation of the church that we lived into for the next 50 years.”That Saturday morning, the Global Methodist Church set out to close that crack.A disclosure before I go on: A week before the vote I published an article here, “The GMC Articles of Faith” (https://plainspokenpod.substack.com/p/the-gmc-articles-of-faith), arguing that discerning delegates might choose not to adopt this document. Two Documents on One ShelfOur 2024 Book of Doctrines and Discipline, adopted at the convening General Conference in Costa Rica, kept the old arrangement and said plainly that it was temporary. Paragraph 106 said both the Articles of Religion and the Confession of Faith “define the doctrinal boundaries of our church until such time as a combined Articles of Faith may be approved by the church.” Two documents would mark our boundaries until we wrote one.The Articles of Religion are John Wesley’s 1784 trimming of the Church of England’s Thirty-Nine Articles. The Confession of Faith came from the Evangelical United Brethren: a different accent, the same theological family.If you’ve never read the Articles of Religion, here’s a taste, Article VII:“Original sin standeth not in the following of Adam (as the Pelagians do vainly talk), but it is the corruption of the nature of every man, that naturally is engendered of the offspring of Adam, whereby man is very far gone from original righteousness, and of his own nature inclined to evil, and that continually.”It’s magnificent. It’s also hard going for a new believer in Nairobi or in South Russia, or for that matter in Yazoo City, where I am.The Lock on the DoorSo why didn’t Methodists just rewrite these whenever they liked? Because of the restrictive rules. A restrictive rule is a limit the General Conference puts on itself, a lock on the door, so that no single conference in a heated week can rewrite the faith of the church. Ours, ¶212.1, forbids the General Conference to “revoke, alter, or change” our doctrinal standards, but it left one door open: “Any successor document … shall be adopted by a three-fourths vote of the General Conference.” A high step at the threshold.I’ll own a mistake here. In my August article I wrote that the new Articles would need only a simple majority and would then be locked behind the restrictive rule. The book says three-fourths, and that is how the chair ruled. I was wrong.One Document, Many HandsPetition 1441 came from the Commission on Discipleship, Doctrine and Just Ministry, and it opened with a highlighted line: “This petition deletes ¶106 in its entirety and replaces it.” That isn’t an amendment. It’s a new foundation poured where the old one stood. A writing team convened by David Watson and Jason Vickers drafted it, and the bishops, a fifty-person review team and a public survey all had a hand in it. The drafters set out to say what we believe, not chiefly what we’re against.Twenty-five articles and a sixteen-article confession became fifteen. On the hard doctrines the substance held: “Original sin, which is the corruption of every person’s nature, is the condition into which we are all born. … Apart from prevenient grace, we cannot turn to God.” Plainer English, same doctrine. Three of the fifteen are new: creation and providence, human nature, and repentance. Wesley’s articles on the rulers of the United States and a few others didn’t make the trip, and purgatory was dropped.One more thing. As filed, the article on Holy Scripture said Scripture “is without error in all it affirms.” That inerrancy language was removed.Other petitions offered an alternative text, tried to remove original sin, or added an article on marriage, and on opening day Nathanael Fugate of Allegheny West asked the body to send ten questions to the Connectional Council on Appeals about how all this should be voted on. “If we have clarity on exactly how to vote,” he said, “then we can vote in a way that protects our actions from being reversed by legal scrutiny.” David Watson called it “predicated on a manufactured lack of clarity.” The request needed one-fifth and got 66 of 361. No ruling came.Fifty-Six to NothingThe Doctrine and Sacraments committee, chaired by Matt O’Reilly of North Alabama, supported Petition 1441 as amended, 56 to nothing. It added a line: the Articles of Faith “are affirmed by Scripture and shall be taught in our churches.”Then Scripture. Struck through was the sentence as filed, “Scripture is without error in all it affirms.” In bold was the committee’s replacement: “Scripture is true and entirely trustworthy.” Without error came out. True and entirely trustworthy went in. It was the one place where the committee still felt friction.Saturday MorningOn the floor the chair ruled that three-fourths was required, and that if 1441 passed, the Journal Committee would edit the restrictive rule itself to match. That’s a reasonable reading, but it means the rule gets edited without a separate vote on the rule. File that away for Episode 6.The first delegate to the microphone was from my own conference. Paul Lawler, who was elected a bishop at this General Conference, moved that the article read “Scripture is true in all it affirms, entirely trustworthy, and the only infallible rule of faith and practice.” He told the body why: “We have come out of the land of the Quadrilateral, the land of the '“three buckets” of Scripture, and the land of mainline malaise.” He closed with a line worth repeating: sound and robust doctrine alone will not renew the church, but doctrine on fire will. No one spoke against it, and it passed.No One Spoke Against ItWhat followed wasn’t really debate. It was testimony. Matt Reynolds told the body that in the committee room, “the weight of God fell upon the room.” Alexander Shevchenko of South Russia spoke in Russian: “Today we are adopting a document very important for our church.” Watson called it “not my document, not the writing team’s document, not the Commission’s document, but our document.”The chair asked twice for a speech against. No one came. Long before the conference, large institutional players threw their weight behind this. As it reached the floor, Bishop Greenway made clear it had been planned from the beginning. O’Reilly, Watson, Reynolds and others showed a good deal of emotion and put God’s agency on it. It would have taken a very tacky and hard-hearted person, someone who wanted to go home without any friends, to get up and speak against that work. God himself was said to be essentially the author. So when the final vote came in with one vote against, the presumption was that the one vote was a mistake.O’Reilly got the last word. “These Articles articulate the faith once for all delivered to the saints,” he said, and he prayed. The ballot stayed open a little over three minutes. The screen in the hall showed the count: 370 yes, 1 no. Three-quarters was required, and they got better than 99 percent. The hall sang the Doxology.Then Bishop Scott Jones came to the microphone. “I’m the one who told Billy Abraham in 1998 that this needed to be done,” he said. “This is a big moment for me.”What the Church Now ConfessesHere is the new article on Holy Scripture:“We believe in the divine inspiration and authority of the Old and New Testaments in their entirety. Scripture is true in all it affirms, enti… Get full access to PlainSpoken at plainspokenpod.substack.com/subscribe

A Week of AnxietyAlan Kreider’s The Patient Ferment of the Early Church has shaped me more than most books. The early Christians of Saint Cyprian’s day did not negotiate with the world: no coercion, no force, no violence. Then came Saint Augustine, and a church elevated to operate alongside the state. Sixteen centuries later, we’re still sorting out the relationship.I’m a Global Methodist elder, and ours is largely a postmillennial tradition. We don’t just wait for Jesus to save us from a collapsing world; God has equipped us to foster heavenly places here on earth. To some degree John Wesley seems to have been what we’d now call a Christian nationalist: he believed the church should control government for the glory of God and the benefit of man.Meanwhile, people are worried about Christians gaining a foothold in government and about Doug Wilson’s influence on the White House through Pete Hegseth. This past week brought anxiety about a return to public executions in the age of livestreaming. How far should a government in a nation of Christians use coercion and fear, and how far mercy and non-retaliation?I needed someone more practiced in these questions than I am. Dr. Holder holds a PhD in history from the University of Kentucky, has written between 16 and 20 books, and teaches for Liberty University. He came to faith through the Methodists before leaving us to become a Baptist. I get along with Baptists just fine.Neither Deists Nor EvangelicalsI asked what people usually miss. His answer: we want history to be either/or. Either America was founded as a Christian nation or faith had nothing to do with it. Either the founders were evangelicals or they were all deists. “Really, it’s a whole lot of both and.”His graduate work on the Middle Ages taught him that. Some historians called the medieval church a great civilizing influence on violent warlords; others said its leaders were no different from the warlords. “I’m learning a little bit about the Middle Ages, but I’m really learning a lot about these authors.” They imposed their own theology on the record, and he believes scholars have done the same with the founders.He owns his bias as an ordained minister, though whether Washington was a Christian does nothing to his own faith. Reputable historians call Washington lukewarm. Holder disagrees: “If you go back and study the life that he lived and the things that he did and the things that he said, I think when you and I get to heaven, George Washington is going to be there.”Every Law Is Somebody’s MoralityI’m 42. I started out on the left and I get further right every year, to the point where I now listen to Abolitionists Rising. Russell Hunter and the movement around him make the same argument against abortion that was made against slavery: these are persons. Told to keep their religion out of politics, they point to the law as a teacher and to the sword God has given the state.For he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not carry the sword in vain. — Romans 13:4 (BSB)Others say you can’t legislate morality. The abolitionists answer that all legislation is morality. Dr. Holder agreed: “Every single one.” Don’t murder. Why not? Because it’s immoral to take someone else’s life.He sees real parallels between slavery and abortion: people with no legal standing who can’t fight for themselves, and dehumanizing language to justify it. Then as now, many simply didn’t want to be confronted and just wanted to “go home and watch Netflix.” Some slaveholders were convicted and freed themselves, “but ultimately, it was the government imposing a change.”I asked what Scripture he leans on. Both sides, he said, reach for the command to submit to the governing authorities (Romans 13:1) whenever the law is on their side. For the unborn he named the psalmist:For You formed my inmost being; You knit me together in my mother’s womb. — Psalm 139:13 (BSB)And Paul leaned on his Roman citizenship when people tried to get him in trouble with the law (Acts 22:25). To Holder, that means at the very least we should vote.The Devil Can Use Either SideHe wants people to know Jesus more than anything, and “as soon as you start taking political stands, half of your audience tunes you out.” Politics is the art of compromise, and you can’t do any good if you don’t get elected. How much do you give up for a greater good? That brought him to C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters: “If you lose your Christian charity as you’re arguing the issue, it doesn’t really matter which side of the issue you’re on. The devil wins.” There’s no rubber stamp, only working out our salvation with fear and trembling (Philippians 2:12) and taking up our cross daily (Luke 9:23).I pushed with the abolitionist claim that the only thing holding back a moral resurgence is the cowardice of weak men who insist on compromise. He asked when exactly we had that perfect Christian society, “because narrow is the way” (Matthew 7:14).Then, for the record: “I’m actually pretty partisan.” He just doesn’t advertise it, because most people only want to know whether you’re in their tribe. Jesus, asked about paying taxes, found a third way rather than be boxed in:Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s. — Matthew 22:21 (BSB)“I have very strongly held convictions, and one of them is what we’ve been talking about. I’m very adamantly pro-life.”I brought up the parable of the shrewd manager, which has always messed with me:For the sons of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own kind than are the sons of light. I tell you, use worldly wealth to make friends for yourselves so that when it is gone, they will welcome you into eternal dwellings. — Luke 16:8–9 (BSB)We are called to be the pure bride of Christ, but we shouldn’t be reticent to use our citizenship, wealth and status for the gospel and the constraint of evil. He agreed. “It is the duty of the strong to protect the weak, and there’s no one weaker than a baby in a womb. What is our duty as two Christian men? It’s not to be silent.”Pity as PowerTom Holland’s Dominion argues that all of Western society grew out of Christian canon law and virtue. Now governments use the weak and the victimized to advance their cause against the church, as a state that wants to be more compassionate than the church. How do we operate in that?Be aware, Dr. Holder said, because the “tyranny of the urgent” keeps us from stepping back. Get educated instead of running with the first narrative on X. Pray, because when we neglect prayer “we don’t feel the leading of the Holy Spirit.” And be shrewd, because the culture has changed. Even Jefferson and Franklin wanted faith for other people. Prayer in public schools wasn’t struck down until 1962, “which means for almost 200 years, our government and our population had no problem at all with people praying in school.”It Didn’t CraterPeople can’t pursue what they can’t imagine, and that is the gift of history. The federal government was not explicitly Christian. But every state government under it had Christian, confessional language in its constitution, and many required a public profession of faith to hold office or to vote. People today ask how an explicitly Christian state could possibly work between the Methodists and the Baptists. Once upon a time it did. It didn’t crater.Dr. Holder granted that we are far more pluralistic than we were 200 years ago, with a growing share of people who believe nothing. “On the other hand, one of the cool things about being a Christian is we recognize that God can do whatever God wants.” We’ve had great awakenings before, “and we’re just one great awakening away from, who knows what kind of changes we can see.”More Fire and Brimstone?God made men and women equally in His image and also different, and peace lies in accepting that, not in telling our children they may have been born in the wrong body. So much of what gets dismissed as culture-war stuff is a… Get full access to PlainSpoken at plainspokenpod.substack.com/subscribe

On October 19 I sat down with Rev. Jake Dell, a former Episcopal priest who now pastors a Congregational church in Connecticut. His memoir, Exile and Return, comes out in November. What follows is a written recap of our conversation. The full interview is in the video above.The Secret SocietyI started talking at cameras a few years ago because I was frustrated with how poorly information spread during the United Methodist disaffiliation season. Along the way I found that Methodists weren’t the only ones walking this road. Other Christian institutions had the same story of drift, corruption and changed identity, and I’ve learned a lot from the people who lived it. One of them is Jake Dell. He was one of three main voices in All Are Not Welcome, the documentary Jon Harris of Conversations That Matter released with another crew. It runs an hour and 22 minutes and is free on YouTube.Jake wanted one thing clear at the outset. Most people now hear “Anglican” and think of the Anglican Church in North America, which broke from the Episcopal Church in 2008. “I was ordained in the Episcopal Church and my whole story takes place in the Episcopal Church,” he said. “It’s not about the split.”He’s a Northeastern guy, a Yale man, more at home in elite culture than I’ll ever be. I never fit in in Boston. But we agreed before we hit record that neither of us has ever really fit in where we are. So I started with Yale and its secret societies. To what degree is institutional power like a secret society?“I think it’s very much like a secret society,” Jake said, “in the sense that you don’t always necessarily know when you’re being watched or evaluated or what the right words are to say, what you need to say to get in, what you might say that will keep you out. So there are all kinds of shibboleths.” If you’re lucky, someone comes alongside you early and “for lack of a better word disciples you,” telling you what to say, what to wear, where to show up and who not to talk to.AbominableI’ve never been able to keep it in. My podcast is called PlainSpoken for a reason, and a lot of doors have never opened to me because people know it will be uncomfortable. Reading Jake’s memoir, I sensed he’d had more patience than I have for holding his tongue for the sake of a later, greater goal.He said that’s true, but his default was plain speech too, and he learned young that it wasn’t rewarded. At Yale he wrote a paper on British rule in India, where the British banned sati, the Hindu practice of a widow throwing herself on her husband’s funeral pyre. He called it “the abominable practice of sati.” He was marked down and told not to frame things from a Christian or Western perspective. The TA who graded it was, and still is, quite conservative. “That was actually an example of someone trying to do me a favor,” Jake said, “someone trying to teach me the code language… and also tamping down my plain speech.”I told him it feels to me that whenever you give space, Satan is happy to take it. He’s an opportunist. Jake agreed. He first felt called to ordained ministry in 1991 as a high school senior. At Yale he learned what you could and couldn’t say, at the height of political correctness, and retreated into what he called a conservative underground. After graduating in 1995 he wanted nothing to do with Yale or the institutional church, and he hung his sense of vocation on the wall for about ten years. He explored Roman Catholicism and homeschooling and tried to insulate his family from the world: “Be separate, touch not the unclean thing.”“Therefore come out from among them and be separate, says the Lord. Touch no unclean thing, and I will receive you.” — 2 Corinthians 6:17 (BSB)That ghetto didn’t help him either. Neither circumspection nor withdrawal works, he said. After COVID he came back around to the plain words of Jesus.Simply let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No.’ Anything more comes from the evil one. — Matthew 5:37 (BSB)Turning Up the VolumeSermons like the ones Jake and I preach are seen as extreme today, though early American preachers said far more controversial things. What drove Jake out of the Episcopal Church wasn’t even his preaching. He talked about sin and the need for a Savior in every sermon, and people came for it. One parishioner told him Christ had been missing from that pulpit before he arrived. But he never had the volume anywhere near ten. “My hope was that if I preached the gospel, preached sin, preached atonement and salvation, that the Holy Spirit would do the application. Well, not quite.” Sermons need to spell it out: therefore you cannot do this, therefore you must do that.What got him in trouble was simply being known as a priest who wouldn’t perform a same-sex wedding. People deduced it from where he went to seminary and from the bishop who ordained him. The “big tent” the Episcopal Church promised when it changed its marriage rules collapsed after 2020, under COVID and George Floyd.For me, the capacious middle ended with COVID. I don’t have honest words of comfort for anyone on the cultural or religious left, and I can’t go back. That has been terrifying, because I wonder whether one day no church will take me.I told Jake about Paul Washer preaching to a youth convention in the 1990s. He lit into a culture looking to Britney Spears for what only Christ can give, and the kids cheered and clapped. Then he stopped: “I do not know why you were clapping, because I’m talking about you.” The room went dead silent. Ever since, I’ve known you can’t depend on people to connect the dots. John Wesley, an Anglican priest himself, chases you down until you cry out for mercy.“That’s right,” Jake said. “Hound of heaven.” He also pointed to what Calvin called the power of the keys: the preacher preaches the godly into the church and preaches the ungodly out. If people get up and leave, “that’s probably good because they’re making room for the people who should be there to come in.” Methodists struggle with that. Jake allowed that even in a Methodist church, someone may leave under conviction and find his way back because of something you said.The Blacklist and the Dead CatIn his book Jake describes how it became clear the Episcopal Church had no place for him. He wasn’t formally forced out, but he was smeared. The church’s disciplinary canons were weaponized against him and other conservative clergy, with charges filed without merit, over their involvement with Operation Reconquista and Redeemed Zoomer’s Discord server. Those clergy were acting as chaplains to a spontaneous youth movement.“The church has spent all my life, 50 years, trying to say, how do we reach the young people? Well, when the young people showed up and self-organized, the Episcopal Church didn’t know what to do with it, primarily because they were conservative.” They were the wrong kind of youth, and they hadn’t come up through the system of command and control.Every large organization keeps an informal list, Jake said, whether it’s a law firm or the military. By the end of his tenure, the Episcopal Church was publishing his name on its blacklist outright. In the book he also uses the term “dead cat”: the person who has jumped through the hoops but won’t carry the message. Jake’s other word for it was “sidelined.” He was a priest in good standing, but the fellowships, recommendations and invitations never came. Everything he had learned at Yale told him what was happening. He knew there were meetings he wasn’t invited to.All You Hold Is a PromiseJake’s first parish was in northern Manhattan, at the end of the subway line. It was explicit going in that the diocese wanted to sell part of the property, and he was told to be the poster child for it. The lot was subdivided and sold for a sizable sum, but the congregation didn’t get what it was told it would get. The memorandum of understanding that should have been signed at the start wasn’t drafted until the deal had closed.It doesn’t take corr… Get full access to PlainSpoken at plainspokenpod.substack.com/subscribe

On the Thursday morning of the General Conference in Johannesburg, Chappell Temple, chair of the Social Witness committee, explained why his committee wouldn’t recommend Resolution 1466. They had rewritten it, and they liked the rewrite. But “we substituted something for it that was not at all what he had written.”He was talking about me.Years before the conference, I filed a resolution called “The Racial Theology of the GMC.” It’s the one item in this series I had a direct hand in. All my other petitions were handily dismissed in committee; this one reached the floor. The committee rewrote it, and then in one morning the body amended it, passed it, and rejected it. The delegates may have been right, and I’ll try to represent them fairly. But I still think it was an unforced error that may cause the Global Methodist Church real grief down the line.What We Already SayNobody in Johannesburg was debating whether racism is okay. Our Constitution, ¶204, begins, “All persons are made in God’s image and are loved by Him,” and makes the conditions of membership spiritual ones. Our Social Witness, ¶302.1, says, “We denounce as sin racism, sexism, and other expressions that unjustly discriminate against any person.” Among its Scriptures:“Here there is no Greek or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, or free, but Christ is all and is in all.” —Colossians 3:11The question was whether we should say more, and anticipate the corruptions of the world, or just stand on grand-sounding speech. In the name of fighting racism, many in the anti-racist framework think it’s appropriate to keep being racist in the opposite direction to ameliorate past racism. That’s especially where many of us came from in the United Methodist Church. How much of it has followed us over? That’s my concern.One more piece of inheritance matters. A resolution isn’t church law. It’s the General Conference speaking at a moment in time, and ¶208.13 says resolutions “shall require the support of three-quarters of the General Conference,” in order “to effectively speak on behalf of the whole church.” A petition to strike that rule was rejected, so it stood.What I FiledI filed it as an individual, as any member may. My rationale called it “an attempt to provide a theological framework in which to root future decisions.” I wasn’t asking for a program. I was asking the church to say what it believes about race, so that later decisions about leadership, appointments and how we measure ourselves would be made rightly.It said race, as the world uses the word, isn’t the church’s category. It said we won’t judge our faithfulness by racial counting, and it rejected segregating the church by race. It named anti-racism and rejected its claim that “current discrimination must be practiced in order to remedy past discrimination.” It welcomed all people to every level of ministry on one condition, the one in Wesley’s General Rules: that they “desire to flee from the wrath to come and be saved from their sins.” It said, “The GMC will not be a happy home for people who want to stick with their own worldly identifiers.” And it closed with a promise of Jesus: we will seek first the Kingdom of God, trusting God to add to us all people of all ages, ethnicities and nations.Looking back, “shown the door,” in one sentence, was an American turn of phrase that wasn’t right for a global document. And a resolution couldn’t have had teeth anyway. Its purpose was to make anti-racists uncomfortable. Some will call this an American worry. I don’t think so. America has been exporting its culture for most of a century. Grievance knows no borders.What the Committee DidA subcommittee rewrote 1466, using a substitute from Alex Hoffman, a lay delegate from Allegheny West. In the Daily Journal every word I wrote is struck through. Then the committee voted 29 to 12 not to approve its own rewrite.The substitute was a gentler, cleaner, more likable text, a nicer cousin with a family resemblance. It kept the rejection of racial quotas and metrics as measures of the church’s faithfulness, the rejection of segregation, and “seek first the Kingdom of God.” It turned my “neo-Marxist understandings of race” into ideologies that “make group conflict fundamental to human relationships,” a fair description in words that travel better. It dropped the words anti-racism and neo-Marxist and Wesley’s condition, and it added Genesis 1:27 and “reconciliation and justice.”Twenty-nine to twelve is about 71 percent, short of the 90 percent needed for a consent agenda, so 1466 came to the floor on its own. Most legislation in Johannesburg was a slam dunk one way or the other. This margin points to a real fissure.Thursday MorningTemple introduced it as a resolution, “should we choose to go down the route of having those sort of things.” This was a new kind of animal for the GMC, and the committee wasn’t sure we ought to have resolutions at all. Tying my effort to a United Methodist habit put a real stink on it, and a chair with long-standing conservative bona fides made it pretty clear how he expected everyone to feel.Alex Hoffman spoke for it. His argument was about what resolutions should be: short and principle-first, with Wesley’s social holiness as the principle. He also told the body resolutions “can be adopted by a simple majority.” Remember that.Then Daniel Buck, a lay delegate from Great Lakes, moved to strike the paragraph that began “We reject ideologies and systems that segregate people.” Such a paragraph might reach things like countries, he said, and “I also find some concern with the racial quotas aspect as well.”That amendment gutted what was left of any language that would constrain anti-racism activism in the GMC. I was amazed that someone would defend racial quotas. Buck was one of the chairs of the subcommittee that reviewed this, so he knew it was no threat to national borders. Our Oasis Conference already covers many nations at once. Scripture has no quarrel with nations: “From one man He made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and He determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their lands” (Acts 17:26). The paragraph was against dividing the church.The amendment carried. After Sam Gregory of West Plains asked that the body vote on the resolution itself, the chair agreed, “It belongs to you.” The resolution as amended was supported. No threshold was announced.“I Made a Mistake Earlier”After the break Bishop Mark Webb came back to the microphone. He was glad, he said, that sanctifying grace applies to presiding at General Conference: “A layman’s term of that is clean up on aisle four.” Then: “I made a mistake earlier.” Resolutions need three-quarters, and the resolution had passed, but not by 75 percent. The body voted again with the threshold stated, and it failed.The printed rule and his correction match. Hoffman’s “simple majority” didn’t. Two understandings of the rule were in the room, and the first vote went ahead without anyone saying which was right. I don’t think Bishop Webb needed to apologize. The procedural know-how belongs to others at that table, and it was a long, intense week with a lot of pressure to finish on time.What StandsThere is no General Conference resolution on the racial theology of the Global Methodist Church: not mine, not the committee’s, not the amended one. ¶302.1 says what it said. On race, on paper, nothing changed.That leaves questions. If the church wants to say more about race, where should it say it? Is “no racial quotas or metrics” a conviction we share, or a debate we haven’t had and don’t want to have? It survived from my draft into the committee’s, then went out with Buck’s amendment. And what should a committee do with a petition it wants to rewrite completely?I’ll start with the rule that sank it, because I think the rule is right. A church spread across Africa, Europe, Asia and the Americas shouldn’t speak for all its people on … Get full access to PlainSpoken at plainspokenpod.substack.com/subscribe

Considering Johannesburg, Episode 3. Watch the full episode above. The free discussion guide is here: [GUIDE LINK]. Episode 2, on sex and gender identity, is here: [EP02 LINK].On the last afternoon of the General Conference in Johannesburg, two women went to the same microphone about a minute apart. The first was Megan Alamo, a pastor from the Great Lakes Conference. The second was Mandy White, a laywoman from West Plains who sat on the committee that wrote the text they were arguing over.Neither of them thinks abortion is a good thing. Neither of them wants a church that shrugs at it. What they disagreed about was a single clause, and what that clause says, or refuses to say, to women trying to navigate righteousness in modern medicine and family.That argument got about eleven minutes on the floor. What came out the other end is now the Global Methodist Church’s witness on the unborn and their mothers.This topic isn’t abstract for a lot of you. Some of you have sat with a daughter in a doctor’s office and heard news nobody wants to hear. Some of you have carried a child you were told would not live. And some of you have had an abortion and you’ve never told your pastor. We live in a world in which there are roughly 73 million induced abortions per year, more than a quarter of all pregnancies. I’m going to be plain about what the church decided and what I believe, and I’m going to call sin what it is. But I’m not going to act as though God’s grace doesn’t apply in these situations. It does.One Soft WordOur Social Witness, ¶302, is what Chappell Temple, this year’s committee chair, called fourteen simple statements. They don’t set penalties. They say what we believe God wants of his people, and they say it to the world. The statement right before the abortion paragraph lays the foundation: it is “the particular duty of believers to protect those who may be powerless to protect themselves, including the unborn, those with disabilities or serious illness, and the aged.”So the question was never whether the church opposes abortion. It was how we say it, and what we say about the hardest cases.Here is how the 2024 General Conference left ¶302.3:“The sacredness of all life compels us to resist the practice of abortion except in the cases of tragic conflicts of life against life when the well-being of the mother and the child are at stake. We do not accept abortion as a means of birth control or gender selection, and we call upon all Christians as disciples of the Lord of Life to prayerfully consider how we can support those women facing unintended pregnancies without adequate care, counsel, or resources.”If that exception sounds familiar, it should. The United Methodist Social Principles spoke of “tragic conflicts of life with life” that may justify abortion. Our 2024 language kept the bones of that inheritance. That’s no scandal. We started from what we had.But look at one word: “well-being.” It can mean the mother’s life. It can mean her health. Some would stretch it to mean her circumstances. Several petitioners this year said that word opened the door wider than the church meant to.Seven Petitions, One DirectionPetition 1111 came from one person, Shelley Van Antwerp of Avon Bartlett Chapel in the Great Lakes Conference. She put the mother in the title: “Supplying language to further protect the unborn and the mother.” She struck two words, “except in,” and gave the hard case a different ending: “premature delivery may be necessary with the baby cared for as a separate patient.” In 2024 the answer to the hardest case was, in effect, abortion. In her petition it was: deliver the baby early, and treat that baby as a patient too.Hers was one of seven. Shreve Community in Allegheny West wanted to say that all human life is “sacred and divinely deserving of equal protection under the law.” That’s an abolitionist assertion that many pro-lifers find untenable. John Lomperis called “well-being” very loaded language and wanted pregnancy clinics affirmed by name. Virginia wanted to name disability; the Upper Midwest, eugenics. Michael Cooper’s petition would have said abortion “is always an immoral act that we oppose in all situations,” and it called the church to support those who chose abortion in the past.Not one of these petitions asked the church to be softer, and that’s good. They disagreed about how far to go, and about whether we make provision for things like ectopic pregnancy, molar pregnancy, or a couple of other rare conditions in which it might be necessary to remove a baby from the womb prematurely.What the Committee BuiltThe Social Witness committee, with four doctors in the room, voted 38 to nothing. It didn’t just pass Van Antwerp’s petition. It rebuilt the paragraph: a new opening sentence borrowed from Shreve Community, minus the equal-protection line. The first sentence now ends at the word “abortion.” Period. No “except.” “Well-being” became “mortality.” The birth control and gender selection sentence was struck. Fathers were named. And “consider how we can support” became “support.”Then, on Thursday, from the platform, Temple made a correction before anybody had pulled anything: “with the baby and the mother cared for as separate patients.” It’s small, and it may be the most important edit in the whole story. Without it the sentence leaves the mother out. With it, the text names two patients, and a doctor owes care to both.Eleven MinutesMegan Alamo pulled the petition off the consent agenda on Thursday, and then it sat until Saturday, when the conference was nearing its end and a good deal of business was still undone.Here I need to say a brief “I was right.” When I saw the breadth of material before the conference, and knew the priority that would be placed on worship, I knew some topics would get short shrift and that there would be a good deal of interest in shoving things through under omnibus packages. By Saturday afternoon Bishop Jones believed the Social Witness items were finished: “We’re not gonna vote on any more social issues.” It took a question from Isaac Salgado of South Georgia, and another from Chris Gadlage of Great Lakes, to get the petition back in front of the body with about nineteen minutes left. If someone hadn’t done their due diligence in the moment, none of the substantial conversation would have happened. Much more could likely have been done with more time. As we’ll see, care for mothers who have chosen abortion got dropped and forgotten. Rushing things through has a cost.Alamo offered a substitute that restored the exception, narrowed to “mortality.” She agreed with “the heart and intent” of the petition. Her concern was a gap:“It does not address what a woman, what a mother who is facing a life threatening medical emergency should do in something like the event of an ectopic pregnancy where a premature birth is impossible.”Mandy White answered for the committee. The doctors had presented premature delivery as an option, and the committee wanted to say so: “If you leave it vague, then they will come to their own conclusion.” Her objection landed on both of the old phrases. “Except in the cases of” says there are cases where abortion is acceptable. So does “we do not accept abortion as a means of birth control,” because it implies we might accept it as a means of something else. Her summary: “We do not like abortion, except sometimes we do.”One speech for and one against. The substitute failed on a show of hands. Then the petition itself, by electronic ballot, three-quarters required: 300 to 49. Temple, still standing at the microphone, said, “Now Lord, let thy servant depart in peace.” That’s Simeon in the temple, holding the child.Here is ¶302.3 now:“We believe that all human life, regardless of level of development or ability, is sacred. The sacredness of all life compels us to resist the practice of abortion. In the cases of tragic conflict of life against life when the mortality of the mother or the child … Get full access to PlainSpoken at plainspokenpod.substack.com/subscribe

For most of this year I have been talking about the 2026 General Conference of the Global Methodist Church from thousands of miles away. I saved 33 hours of plenary livestream. But I haven’t been in the rooms where it happened.Bill Kyle was. Bill is a member of First Methodist in Yazoo City, where I serve, and he chairs our Staff-Parish Relations Committee, which helped bring me here less than a year ago. He has been a member of this church since the mid-’70s. He had just retired when our conference superintendent, Lauren Porter, asked whether he’d be considered as a lay delegate from the Mississippi West Tennessee Conference. Bill’s answer: “Well, just tell me when and I’ll be there.” Then Lauren mentioned the delegation meetings. “Meetings,” Bill said, “what are you talking about?”Many of you who watch our live worship asked me to sit down with Bill. This is that conversation.“You vote the way you feel led to vote”I asked Bill whether it was as simple as showing up with your Bible and doing what the Bible says. “Well, it was not that simple, Jeffrey.”Mississippi West Tennessee sent 14 delegates, seven clergy and seven laity, plus alternates. They met about monthly, in person or on Zoom, led by Paul Lawler, who is now Bishop Lawler. They walked through the petitions so everyone understood them. Bill expected to be told how to vote. That never happened:“It was, here’s the petition. Here’s what this is talking about. And Paul was very frequent to say, you vote the way you feel led to vote. I just want to make sure that you understand what the petition is about.”That is encouraging to me. Last time around, North Alabama came out with a statement beforehand announcing which side they were on and what they were going to push for. That felt like politics, and I didn’t like it at all. A lot of people in the Global Methodist world have worried we would replicate that. Bill’s delegation didn’t.The Holy Spirit, or social pressure?The vote counts from the legislative committees showed a lot of consensus. Many took that to mean the Holy Spirit was making us of one mind. I also worried about social pressure, where nobody wants to be the one sticking out.Bill served on the Doctrines and Sacraments Committee. It was his second choice; he had wanted Local Church, the part of the Book of Doctrines and Discipline he uses most as SPRC chair. “That’s not where the Lord wanted me,” he said, and he’s glad of it. Before they left, Paul had told the delegation something Bill kept in mind all week: “What we know is we don’t want to be UMC. We know we want to be something different. We might all have different ideas about what that is.”The committee broke into small working groups that brought recommendations back to the full committee. There was “a lot of agreement, but there was also a lot of disagreement,” Bill said, handled “in a loving manner.”“I never felt any pressure in that committee to adopt certain words or certain phrases or certain pieces of legislation or kick out certain pieces of legislation... And I do think that the Holy Spirit was moving in the room.”I asked whether any issue from his committee is likely to come back over the next six years. I brought up the concerns from our Considering Johannesburg panel on the sacraments, including laity and deacons presiding over them. That one, Bill said, drew a lot of discussion: “some very valid reasons” on one side, and “a lot of people that were pretty passionate about not giving that authority to the laity” on the other. “I bet that conversation is going to continue.”8:15 in the morning to 9:30 at nightThe livestream only showed us the plenary floor, so I asked how much free time there was. Not much. Bill skipped the safari some delegates took before it started and slept off the jet lag instead.A typical day began with worship around 8:15, about an hour and a half of it, ending with Holy Communion every day, passed down the rows with delegates serving one another. From there they went straight into legislative committee or plenary, and most days ran until 9:00 or 9:30 at night. “I kind of thought it would be, you know, eight to five and then we’ll have the nights off,” he said. “Hey, I was wrong about that. There was none of that.”Even the meals were mostly with the delegation. Wednesday night was the Celebration of Africa: well over a thousand people, local food, and tribes and nations from across Africa sharing their dances and customs.A church in a storage buildingAnother night, Lauren arranged at the last minute, with a huge rugby match in town, a dinner for about 40 or 50 people from Mississippi West Tennessee and the Mega-Manila and Covenant conferences from the Philippines, which our conference has partnered with to help them get established. Bill said it was one of the things he enjoyed most.The man sitting next to him pulled out his phone and showed Bill their worship service. The church was meeting in a storage building.“It’s one thing for us to write a check and we’re out and we’ve got our deed back and there’s no trust clause or anything like that. A lot of these churches in the Philippines just had to leave their building.”None of us wants to carry over the United Methodist practice of sending 12% of your money up to a bureaucratic structure that may or may not spend it well abroad. We pay 1% to the general church, and the general church isn’t interested in being a middleman. It’s one thing just to send money at people. It’s another to have a partnership where people know and respect and care for one another, and that is what happened at that dinner. Bill left with new Facebook friends and phone numbers. One man, Ray, may come to Mississippi, and Bill fully intends to go to the Philippines.Our new bishopOur new bishop, Luther Oconer, is from the Philippines, and Bill spent time with him during breaks. “He’s on fire,” Bill said. I’ve been in worship services he has facilitated, and he’s a live wire. Talk to him for three minutes and you might not see it, but get him talking about Jesus and you will. Bill thinks that excitement will push us toward “more than just letting the church be a place that we come for service, but more a place where we’re reaching out.” Bishop Oconer also told Bill, “Now I got a reason to come to Yazoo City.” He’s very welcome here.The Global Methodist Church has, to my mind, a convoluted way of doing bishops, designed to keep bishops from building centers of power and ruling over them. A bishop can’t serve where he already has a power base, and he serves four or five annual conferences at once. That’s why a Filipino bishop is now serving Mississippi.Plenary, worship, and the last dayOn the livestream, the plenary all came through a sound board, so I asked what the room was really like. Bill sat at the end of his delegation’s row, next to two women from Thailand, and over the week they got more conversational despite the language barrier. What he liked best were the preachers, especially a pastor from South America, the first sermon he had ever heard through an interpreter.Until the last day, the plenary looked from afar like everyone was on the same page. Then petitions on sex and gender, divorce and remarriage, homosexuality, and abortion were pulled off the consent agenda, and the rhetoric changed. Bill said there were moments when he wondered whether it was about to get contentious, but it calmed down quickly. He was surprised those subjects came up at all: “I thought we kind of moved past that already.” There was no celebration when votes passed. When some people clapped, Bishop Jeff Greenway was quick to stop it: “Hey, we’re not applauding votes. That’s not what we’re about.”The same JesusI asked whether, in all those encounters, the sameness or the difference stood out more. “The sameness would have probably outweighed” the difference, Bill said.One was Jerry Kulah of Liberia, co-lead of the Doctrines and Sacraments Committee and now a bishop: “Man, we live worlds awa… Get full access to PlainSpoken at plainspokenpod.substack.com/subscribe

The free discussion guide is here: [GUIDE LINK]. If you missed Episode 1, on marriage, divorce and remarriage, it’s here: [EP01 LINK].Not a Word I Disagree WithOn the last day of the 2026 General Conference, Lori Rowe, a lay delegate from Florida, walked to microphone three to speak against an amendment. Her first words were, “There’s not a word that I disagree with in the substitute amendment.”Her objection wasn’t to anything the amendment in front of her said. It was to what it replaced. And that’s this whole story in a sentence.Petition 1127 rewrote the Global Methodist Church’s statement on sexual sin and added its first explicit statement on sex and gender identity. On the floor it took about ten minutes, and every argument that mattered was about what gets left out. What must a church say to a girl being told she might really be a boy? To frightened parents? To an adult who transitioned years ago and walks into your church next Sunday? And what must a church never forget to say?This is a tender subject. Some of you love someone who has wrestled with gender dysphoria, or have wrestled with it yourselves. I’m going to tell you the truth as I understand it, the way Jesus would want it told to someone he loves, because he does love you.Two Sentences and a DoorOur Social Witness, ¶302, is fourteen short statements, each a sentence or two with Scripture attached. We made it short on purpose, after decades of watching the United Methodist Social Principles grow into what Chappell Temple, this year’s Social Witness chair, called the quadrennial bloodletting. Changing it took a three-quarters vote, and whatever we wrote into ¶302 in Johannesburg will be very difficult to rewrite.Here is ¶302.8 as the church adopted it in Costa Rica in 2024:“We are saddened by all expressions of sexual behavior, including pornography, polygamy, and promiscuity, that do not recognize the sacred worth of each individual or that seek to exploit, abuse, objectify, or degrade others, or that represent less than God’s intentional design for his children. While affirming a scriptural view of sexuality and gender, we welcome all to experience the redemptive grace of Jesus and are committed to being a safe place of refuge, hospitality, and healing for any who may have experienced brokenness in their sexual lives.”Two sentences. The first is a statement of sorrow; the second is a welcome. Twelve of the fourteen statements in ¶302 open with “We believe.” This one opened with “We are saddened,” the only one that tells the world how we feel.It named three behaviors, a vice list like the ones in Scripture, and gave three tests for everything else. The word “gender” appeared once, undefined. Nothing about two sexes, transition or children. In 2024 that silence may have looked like restraint. By 2026 a good many of our people had decided it looked like somewhat of a negligent gap.And it ended with the door open: “we welcome all to experience the redemptive grace of Jesus.” As the legislation developed, that language of welcome seemed to go missing.Call Sin SinFive petitions were aimed squarely at ¶302.8, from Springfield Oaks in South Georgia, Jonathan Lee of the Upper Midwest, Stewart Kouba of Trinity and others, most wanting to name specific sins. I wish those had gotten more play; I think particularity is our friend. Of the four I could read, every one kept a statement of welcome.Then there’s 1127, filed by David Watson of Allegheny West, who really needs no introduction. His rationale was blunt:“As a church, we are not primarily interested in what makes us sad, but in identifying ethical and unethical forms of behavior. We identify immoral actions as sinful.”Three aims, plainly stated: call sin sin; say there are two sexes and that sex and gender belong together; and deal with intersex conditions head on, so nobody can use them to argue the categories away. This was all very solid, and I appreciate Watson for it.His petition changed the verb to “we recognize as sinful,” added sex slavery to the list, affirmed “there are two sexes,” and called intersex conditions “disordered” while valuing the person as the image of God. It called transition “morally wrong” for adults and “physical child abuse” for minors. And it closed with a sharper welcome than 2024’s, naming “those with gender dysphoria and same-sex attraction.”I filed Petition 1457, a statement under ¶302.9 on biblical anthropology: that all persons are created by God in his image as male and female, and that human identity isn’t defined by fallen desires, inclinations or temptations but by redemption and sanctification in Christ. The committee voted not to approve it, 40–0 with one abstention. So now you know where I stand, and you know I lost.Thirty-Six to ThreeThe Social Witness committee supported 1127 as amended, 36–3–0 (Daily Journal, Wed 2 Sep, p. 40). It added adultery and pedophilia to the list. Good. It struck the “physical child abuse” sentence. I think that’s regrettable. And it added a paragraph opposing “practices, policies, or interventions that encourage or assist minors in seeking to alter their God given sex through social, medical, or surgical transition”: narrower, with no word about adults, but wider, reaching social transition and policies.One thing isn’t marked at all. The petition’s third paragraph, welcome and Scripture references included, simply isn’t there, not struck through, just absent. When Temple presented it on the floor he seemed to indicate it was supposed to be there, but I still found myself confused.At 92 percent in committee, 1127 went on a consent agenda, to be adopted without debate. On Thursday, Bella Duke of Mid-Texas and ten delegates pulled it off, and it waited two days.Ten MinutesSaturday was the last day of legislation. Brad Folsom of South Georgia moved to cut debate to two speeches each way, two minutes apiece, and the body, tired and watching the clock, chose speed. An hour later Temple brought 1127 to the floor, read something close to the missing welcome, and called on Susan Kent of Trinity, who had a substitute “which will simplify this whole petition.” Kent kept “We believe,” the word “sinful,” and the welcome and Scripture references, but left out everything specific: no named behaviors, not even pornography; no marriage; no two sexes; nothing on minors. Her text, she said, “does not define our Christian ethics by a list of prohibited behavior, but roots it in God’s design of humanity.”To my mind, given the myriad vice lists found in our very Scriptures, Kent’s proposal was decidedly unscriptural.Lori Rowe’s reply was the mirror image. She agreed with every word of the substitute; her objection was its silence, above all about children. “We have children who are being asked to reject their sex by their peers, by their schools, by people online. This is being done without consent or knowledge of parents.” She asked for “unmistakable condemnation of these practices.” Practices, notice: not children, not parents.The substitute failed on a show of hands, and I’m very glad for it. No one spoke for or against 1127 itself; the chair went straight to the ballot. The hall screen put up the count: 308 yes, 41 no, about 88 percent, well past the three-quarters it needed.Then Temple took the microphone: “Many of us have been working on this issue for more than 40 years. … You’ve made my last rodeo my best one.” Anyone who lived through the long Methodist argument over sexuality, from 1972 to the division that gave us the Global Methodist Church, heard relief in that. The church was finally saying out loud what it has always believed.What the Book Says NowAs printed, the adopted text calls sinful all sexual behavior that exploits, abuses, objectifies or degrades, naming adultery, pedophilia, pornography, polygamy, promiscuity and sex slavery; grounds our ethic in God’s design of us “as males and females” and in marriage between one man and one woman; affirms “there are two sexes”; c… Get full access to PlainSpoken at plainspokenpod.substack.com/subscribe

Considering Johannesburg, Episode 1. Watch the full episode here: [VIDEO LINK]. The free discussion guide is here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1plegQvXTa_4jY96lgjwTejwcDuOSr5va/view?usp=sharing.On the last morning of the 2026 General Conference, Rich Hoffman, a lay delegate from Allegheny West, told the Global Methodist Church, “In 345 pages, the words divorce and remarriage do not appear once. If what we leave unsaid shapes our witness, then this silence matters.”He was right. Our book told the world who could marry. It never said a word about what happens when a marriage breaks. Every pastor reading this knows why that matters: every day we minister to people in the wreckage of divorce.This is the first installment of Considering Johannesburg, eleven of the biggest changes our General Conference made, each followed from the language we inherited to the final product. Most of us will only ever hear the headline. I want you to see the words, the people, and the votes, and make up your own mind. For Thursday the 3rd and Saturday the 5th there are no published minutes, so the livestream is the only record.Why it mattersTim Reaves of North Carolina remembered what Stanley Hauerwas, his teacher at Duke Divinity School, said years ago: “we could not really deal with the issue of homosexuality until we have dealt with the issue of divorce.” Then Reaves added, “Folks, it is all on the same plane.”That is self-evidently right. The questions about homosexuality that tore the United Methodist Church apart didn’t come from nowhere. They grew out of confusion about marriage, about sexuality, and about embodiment itself. What are these bodies? What is sexuality for? A church that won’t say plainly what marriage is will struggle to say anything clear and compelling about the rest.The language we inheritedParagraph 302 holds our Social Witness statements, which Chappell Temple, chair of the Social Witness committee, described as our effort “to corporately express our understanding of the character of God.” Number seven, as adopted in Costa Rica in 2024, reads in full:“We believe that human sexuality is a gift of God that is to be affirmed as it is exercised within the legal and spiritual covenant of a loving and monogamous marriage between one man and one woman.”Three citations follow: Exodus 20:14, Ephesians 5, and Matthew 19:3–9. Hold on to that last one. It is the passage where the Pharisees ask Jesus whether a man may put away his wife “for every cause.” The citation was there. The explicit language wasn’t.That is new for Methodists. The United Methodist Social Principles most of us grew up with called divorce “a regrettable alternative in the midst of brokenness.” The Global Methodist Church wrote briefly, and on purpose. When you are already being slandered as the anti-gay church, a hard line on divorce only makes some people more squeamish.The petition and the committeePetition 1020 came from Jonathan Lee of Christ’s Community Church in the Upper Midwest (not the Jonathan Lee elected bishop). Our book, he wrote, “does not clearly state that homosexual practice—like all sexual activity outside biblical marriage—is sin that calls for repentance and transformation through the grace of Jesus Christ.” That is solid biblical language.His text made the paragraph about marriage itself, “a lifelong covenant” between one man and one woman, added that “sexual intimacy belongs only within the covenant of marriage,” and closed with a sentence former United Methodists will recognize: all other forms of sexuality are “incompatible with the Bible and traditional Christian teachings.” Still nothing about divorce. The Matthew citation even got shorter, stopping at verse 6, just before Jesus is asked about Moses and the writing of divorcement.The Social Witness committee struck that “therefore” sentence, the one that carried the petitioner’s purpose. The journal doesn’t say why. I think it was a mistake. It then supported the petition 35–1–0 (Daily Journal, Wed 2 Sep, p. 39), which put it on a consent agenda to pass without debate.Divorce came up in that room. We know only because members said so later on the floor. Daniel Griswold: “there was a lot of resistance to talking about this at all.” Tim Reaves: “We really did struggle.” The committee chose to say nothing.On Thursday Temple warned that after this conference, changing a Social Witness statement takes three-quarters of General Conference and then three-quarters of the annual conferences worldwide: “we need to get these witness statements right this time … no pressure there.” Hoffman and nine others pulled 1020 off the consent agenda, and it waited for Saturday.Saturday: the floorUp to then the conference had been euphoric. Those of us who raised concerns from afar were told we were resisting the Holy Spirit. What came next showed that our unity is not without some dissent.Hoffman moved to add:“In addition, we resist divorce and seek reconciliation wherever possible, recognizing divorce and remarriage only as permitted by scripture, while affirming the forgiveness, restoration, and full participation in the life of the church of those who have experienced divorce.”He restored Matthew 19 through verse 9 and added Mark 10 and 1 Corinthians 7. “Our witness should not merely tell the world who can enter a marriage,” he said. “It should also tell the church what marriage calls us to become.” And: “None of us should ask the church to change, remove, or hide a biblical moral teaching simply because it intersects with our own history.”Joy Hook of Great Lakes answered with an instinct we know from the mainline: “the book should be full of not what we resist, but what we’re for.” Jeremy Auvil of North Alabama, a child of divorce, said his parents were “more godly people outside of the marriage that they had committed to,” and urged us to “be careful of the things that we disavow.” Daniel Griswold of South Carolina went straight to the text: “Jesus does teach on divorce.” He does:“He saith unto them, Moses because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so.” (Matthew 19:8)It sounded like exactly what it was: mainline Americans flinching at the prospect of recovering a disposition that corrects our culture. And one of the remarkable things about Johannesburg was watching the international delegations gently, but firmly, push the Americans back into our Bibles.An amendment to the amendmentMatt O’Reilly of North Alabama rewrote Hoffman’s text:“We recognize that divorce is always deeply grievous and encourage reconciliation as often as possible. We also recognize that scripture allows for divorce under certain circumstances and that reconciliation is not always possible.”His reason deserves a hearing: “Those passages are incredibly complicated. And I would be hesitant to enshrine in the Book of Doctrines and Discipline anything that looks like a particular interpretation of those passages.” Gone were “only as permitted by scripture,” the word “remarriage,” and the promise of full participation. I preferred Hoffman’s version. O’Reilly’s was still better than silence.Kathleen Engelman of Great Lakes, whom I have long appreciated as a solid believer, gave some of the most personal testimony of the week: “I was married for nine years, five months and 28 days … I truly am blessed to be divorced.” I thought Hoffman’s language was good, but it is right to consider her and the many people she represents.Then came the speech I had been praying we’d hear in the GMC. Of twenty delegates who spoke on this petition, only Anbessu Feyissa of the Ethiopia Nazrawiyan Conference rose to say the language should be stronger: “we need stronger and clearer language regarding divorce.” He also spoke for the spouse who is left: “We should not hold the faithful spouse responsible for a decision they did not make and could not control.”O’Reilly’s amendment passed 308–62. Eddie Bromley of my o… Get full access to PlainSpoken at plainspokenpod.substack.com/subscribe